About the author

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he soon encountered the patients whom he would write about in his book Awakenings.Dr Sacks spent almost fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as 'the poet laureate of medicine', and over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.For more information, please visit www.oliversacks.com.

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‘Oliver Sacks is a perfect antidote to the anaesthetic of familiarity. His writing turns brains and minds transparent’ Observer

How does the brain perceive and interpret information from the eye?

And what happens when the process is disrupted?

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world – and The Mind’s Eye is testament to the myriad ways that we, as humans, are capable of rising to this challenge.

‘The Mind's Eye is about the possibility of recovery and the inexorable decline of the ageing individual. From this collision of incompatible truths, tragedy is made . . . making this Sacks's most powerful book to date’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Packed with wisdom, humour, extraordinary human stories and reflections on how we all perceive the world . . . He ends with a brilliant discussion of blindness and the ways in which blind people develop visual concepts. Heartily recommended’ Reader’s Digest